THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you all for that warm welcome.
Sit down, please. My wife, Lynne, and I are delighted to be here
today. I brought Lynne with me. Lynne, you want to stand up?
(Applause.) And by the way, that's daughter Mary, next to her, who's
working within our campaign operation. (Applause.)

You know, I often tell people that Lynne and I got married because
Dwight Eisenhower got elected President in 1952. Where is he going
with that story? The fact is, in 1952, I was a youngster living in
Lincoln, Nebraska, with my folks. Dad worked for the Soil Conservation
Service. Eisenhower got elected, he reorganized the Agriculture
Department, Dad got transferred to Casper, Wyoming, and that's where I
met Lynne. We grew up together and went to high school together and
next month we'll celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. (Applause.)
And I explained that to a group the other day, that if it hadn't been
for Dwight Eisenhower's victory in 1952, Lynne would have married
somebody else. (Laughter.) She said, right, and now he'd be Vice
President of the United States. (Laughter and applause.)

Of course, we've got Janet Huckabee with us this morning, the wife
of the governor. (Applause.) And I want to thank Win Rockefeller, he
does a great job for all of us. (Applause.)

Well, I was -- what I'd like to today, if I can, is, I've got some
thoughts I'd like to share with you, wanting to begin with, and then
we'll open it up to questions, have an opportunity to respond to your
comments and concerns, as well, as we go forward here.

Let me begin by pointing out -- some of you may have watched the
events up in Boston last week, the other party's convention. I watched
a little bit. But the thing to note now, of course, is I have an
opponent, I've got a real, live, honest-to-goodness opponent now in the
race for Vice President. Somebody said the other day that John Edwards
got picked for Vice President because he was sexy, charming, good
looking, had great hair -- (laughter) -- I said, how do you think I got
the job? (Laughter and applause.)

But all kidding aside, this is going to be a very important
election. I say that not just because my name is on the ballot, but
because of the enormous significance of the choice we're going to make
with respect to the future of America; the kind of policies we pursue,
both in terms of defending our nation against the threats that we're
now under as well as the basic fundamental decisions we make here at
home, in terms of the economy, and how we protect and defend those
basic rights and values that are so important to all Americans.

What I'd like to do this morning is take a few minutes and talk
about, specifically about what has come to be known as the war on
terror or the national security challenges that we now face since last
September 11th of 2001.

That really was a morning that changed everything. I think it
helps sometimes to gain perspective on that, if you reach back to what
the world looked like on January 20th of that year, when the President
and I were sworn-in on the Capitol steps in Washington. The fact was
that on that morning, the planning for the attack of 9/11 was already
well underway. The hijackers had already been chosen, the training had
gone forward, money had been raised, some of them were already in the
United States, the targets had been selected, and they were well down
the road toward planning and then, ultimately, executing the attack on
9/11 that killed some 3,000 of our fellow citizens that morning.

Separate and apart from that, of course, in Afghanistan the al
Qaeda had found a home base from which they could operate. Osama bin
Laden had established bases there, there were hundreds of al Qaeda in
the country, the Taliban were in power. The al Qaeda were operating a
series of training camps through which had passed some 20,000
terrorists since 1996, when those camps first opened, through the
decade -- or by the year 2000, terrorists subsequently dispersed around
the world and set up cells in some 60 countries, including right here
in the United States.

We had a situation, obviously, in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was in
power -- a man who had started two wars, a man who had previously
produced and used weapons of mass destruction against his own people
and against the Iranians, a man who had provided safe harbor and
sanctuary for terrorists, who had specifically provided a base of
operations for Abu Nidal, one of the worst terrorist organizations in
the Middle East, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; was paying $25,000 to
the families of suicide bombers; and who, as well, had a relationship
with al Qaeda.

We also had at the same time a couple of other concerns, in terms
of that part of the world. We had the difficult problem with the
proliferation of nuclear weapons technology. At the time, it was known
to us through intelligence sources -- but it was not yet public -- that
there was an organization headed up by a man named A.Q. Khan. Khan was
the father of the Pakistan nuclear program, he had developed nuclear
weapons for Pakistan. Once he completed that process, he then diverted
that suppliers' network that he put together and began to supply
nuclear weapons technology to some of the world's less attractive
regimes: North Korea, Iran and Libya. By nuclear weapons technology,
I mean specifically the uranium feedstock you needed to build a bomb,
the centrifuge technology that allowed you to enrich uranium to weapons
grade, the weapons design, itself, for how you would actually build a
weapon.

Mr. Khan was in business for himself and, as I say, spreading the
world's deadliest technology to some of the world's most questionable
regimes.

Finally, first Moammar Ghadafi in Libya -- Mr. Khan's best customer
-- he was spending millions to require that capability, that
technology. That was the set of circumstances on January 20th.

There's one other important consideration, too, during that period
of time. The terrorists unfortunately had learned a couple of lessons
that we wish they had not learned, that they learned two things from
the prior history, in terms of their relationship with the United
States. The first lesson was that they could strike us with relative
impunity, because they had done it repeatedly and there had never been
a very effective response from the United States. When I said they did
it repeatedly, as I say, you can go back to 1983, when they bombed the
Marine barracks in Lebanon, in Beirut, and killed 241 of our people one
morning; in 1993, when the first attacked occurred on the World Trade
Center in New York; in 1996, when they hit Khobar towers in Saudi
Arabia, and killed some 17 or 18 of our airmen that morning; in 1998,
when they simultaneously bombed our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in
east Africa; in 2000, when they hit the USSS Cole and killed 17 of our
sailors in the port off Yemen.

That was the pattern over time, and the response from the U.S. in
nearly every instance was to go out and treat these matters as criminal
acts. And the appropriate response, supposedly law enforcement --
you'll run to ground a few times the individual perpetrators of these
acts -- Ramzi Yousef, for example, who ran the operation at the World
Trade Center in '93 -- arrest him, try him and he's now doing 240 years
in a federal pen in Colorado. Good.

The problem was we didn't reach behind Ramzi Yousef to understand
that he was part of a larger problem. Once, after the East Africa
embassy bombings we fired off a few cruise missiles at training camps
in Afghanistan, but didn't hit much, didn't do much damage. So from
the perspective of the terrorists, they've learned, they believe, that
they could strike us with impunity.

The second lesson they learned was if they hit us hard enough, they
could change our policy -- and they had. After the bombing in Beirut
in the barracks, in 1983, we withdrew all our forces from Lebanon. In
1993, when we were hit in Mogadishu and lost 18 or 19 of our soldiers
in the battle of Mogadishu that fall, in a matter of weeks we had all
our forces out of Somalia.

So that combination of events, that sequence of events -- from
their perspective -- they could strike the U.S. virtually cost-free, do
it, change U.S. policy was the lesson that had been learned by the al
Qaeda and other terrorist organizations as they watched our operations
prior to January 20th of 2001.

Then, of course, 9/11 happened, and things changed pretty
dramatically. Partly because the nation rallied around the President's
leadership, because the President took very aggressive action and said
that henceforth, anybody -- anybody -- who supported terrorists or
provided safe harbor or sanctuary for terrorists would be deemed as
guilty of their acts as the terrorists, themselves. (Applause.) That
came to be known as the Bush doctrine. What it basically meant was
that the United States was going to go on offense; no longer would we
wait to be attacked, but we would go on offense and go after the
terrorists wherever we found them, wherever they were planning,
wherever they were training, getting ready to carry out further
operations against the United States; and, as the President indicated,
we would also hold accountable those states that sponsored terror.
(Applause.)

Of course, the first phase of the operation was what we did in
Afghanistan. We moved into Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11 with our
special forces and special ops capabilities, married them up with the
local Afghan fighters who were opposed to the Taliban and our
sophisticated air assets. In a matter of weeks we had taken down the
Taliban, destroyed the regime, killed or captured hundreds of al Qaeda,
closed the training camps where those folks who executed 9/11 had been
trained, and moved a long way towards destroying Afghanistan as a base
of operations for al Qaeda. (Applause.)

In Iraq, of course, we moved into Iraq because of Saddam's past
history of support for terror and his past history of having produced
and used weapons of mass destruction. And, again, in relatively short
order with, I think, one of the more remarkable military campaigns in
history, we took down the government. Saddam Hussein is no longer in
power, he's in jail. (Applause.) His government is gone, it's been
replaced now by an new interim government that I'll talk about in just
a minute.

Mr. Ghadafi in Libya watched all of this unfold, saw our operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and five days after we captured Saddam
Hussein, he went public and announced he was going to give up all of
his weapons of mass destruction. (Applause.) So all of those
materials and plans that he spent millions on for developing nuclear
weapons now reside down at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee. The President
visited them the other day. We've got it all, he turned it all over to
us and decided he no longer would pursue weapons of mass destruction.
(Applause.)

Mr. A.Q. Khan, of course, who was the source at the time -- I think
the worst source of nuclear proliferation in the world, is now under
house arrest in Pakistan. His network has been shut down and he no
longer is in business pedaling nuclear weapons technology to anybody.
(Applause.)

But equally important, having taken down that network of sponsors
of terror and sources of proliferation has been the establishment of
interim governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't just simply go
in and take down a government and then pull out. We have a vested
interest in terms of what's left. We have a strategy that says that
we're going to be a lot safer over the long haul if we can establish
representative democratically-elected governments in Afghanistan and
Iraq. So we're actively involved in that now. (Applause.)

In Afghanistan, we've got Hamid Karzai as the interim President.
They have new constitution. They're going to have free elections this
fall and have the first democratically-elected government in
Afghanistan, I guess, just about ever -- well on their way to establish
exactly the kind of government we want to see, the kind of government
that will not again become a safe haven for terrorists or a threat to
anybody in the region or a threat to the United States.

In Iraq, we've got a good man now who's functioning as the interim
Prime Minister, Mr. Allawi. An interesting man. He's Iraqi by birth,
had a falling out with Saddam many years ago, went into exile in
London. While he was living in London, back in the late '70s, he
became a target of assassination. Three individuals, assassins, put on
to the mission by Saddam Hussein, broke into his bedroom late one night
with an axe, tried to kill him. They did not succeed, obviously --
nearly severed his leg. His wife was there, as well, and she really
never recovered from the events of that night and eventually was
institutionalized and died not long ago. A terrible tragedy for a
family. But this, needless to say, produced one very tough Prime
Minister for Iraq, who's doing a great job now. (Applause.)

And, again, they'll hold elections for a constitutional assembly in
January in Iraq. So once again we're going to do everything we can to
make certain that they get off on the right foot with a representative
government, a government that won't be a threat to anybody in the
future. But, more than that, a government that will be a model, bound
to have an impact on all those countries in the region, in terms of
suggesting that there's another way, a better way compared to the
difficult circumstances that so many people in that part of the world
now live under.

So that's not a bad piece of work when you think about it, over the
course of the last three-and-a-half years.

Now, obviously, a lot of the effort that went into all of that was
the result of the President's leadership. But first and foremost --
the President would be the first one to say this -- first and foremost
-- the debt we owe is to our men and women in uniform. (Applause.)

Just a couple of additional thoughts, and then I'll stop and we can
get into questions. It's been very important, as well, for us to take
whatever steps are necessary here at home to make it more difficult to
strike the United States, that is to make us safer. So we've taken a
number of steps in that regard, some just this week. There, you've got
to look at such things as the new Department of Homeland Security, the
President established and we got passed -- 180,000 employees gathered
together now, all focused on one basic fundamental proposition. And
that's making America as safe as possible from terrorist attack.
(Applause.)

It also includes things like the Patriot Act, which give us the
authority -- some of the same authorities that are already being used
by law enforcement to prosecute drug traffickers, for instance, apply
those same techniques, and use those same techniques in prosecuting
terrorists -- (Applause.)

It includes a complete reorientation of the FBI so they're focused
less on cleaning up after a terrorist attack, in terms of prosecuting
the individuals responsible for it, with a greater focus now on
preventing the attack by working effectively -- (Applause.)

It includes Project BioShield, one of the President's ideas, just
signed into law within the last couple of weeks that will allow us to
equip NIH and other federal health agencies with the capabilities they
need, and to develop the sophisticated medical means by which we can
counter, for example, an attack with biological weapons. It also
includes -- (applause) -- includes the announcement made just yesterday
by the President in terms of moving forward, some of the
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission with respect to strengthening
our intelligence capabilities, in terms of our ability to coordinate
across agencies at the federal level, the establishment of a National
Counterterrorism Center, the establishment of a National Intelligence
Director, who will have broad responsibilities for overseeing all of
the activities -- the intelligence community, as well, too. So it
doesn't mean that we've -- by any means achieved perfection with
respect to defending the country from terrorist attack. I don't want
to leave anybody with that impression.

Anybody who has thought about it knows there's no such thing as an
absolutely perfect defense. We can be successful 99.9 percent of the
time, and they only have to get through once in order to hit us. And
if they do, with some of the deadly technologies that are now available
out there such as biological weapons, or chemical weapons, or even a
nuclear weapon, the results for one of our cities could be
catastrophic.

So it's very important that not only we do everything we can here
at home to toughen the target, but we have to go on offense. We have
to go after the terrorists wherever they reside. It's the only way we
can guarantee our safety. (Applause.)

Now, this campaign, in part, is going to turn upon the decision the
American people make about what kind of strategy they want to pursue
going forward. Do they think the President and the rest of us who
serve him are on the right track? (Applause.) If that's the case,
then I think there's only one choice in this election. (Applause.)
All right. (Applause.)

My impression is that sometimes the other team is stuck in the
pre-9/11 mentality. They haven't made the transition to what the world
is like post-9/11. (Applause.) But having said that, again, I want to
thank all of you for being here this morning. I thank you for your
willingness to help this enterprise, and I'd be happy to take a few
questions. We've got people with microphones out here in the audience,
if they would come. Here's a questioner right down front. Why don't
you wait for the mike so we can hear?

Q Mr. Vice President, I'm a retired brigadier general, U.S.
Army. And first I want to -- (applause) -- first, I want to thank you
for coming to Arkansas. (Applause.) And we also want to thank our
President, George Bush, and you, and the rest of the Cabinet for waging
this war -- this successful war on terrorism, which will make our
country much, much safer.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

Q We've seen quite a lot in the media in the last few days, and
you touched on the results of the 9/11 Commission and what the
administration's plans are for implementing some of those
recommendations. Would you please go into a little more detail on
that, on maybe the possibility -- I know the Democrats are pushing for
doing all of this in a hurry-up mode, which I guess meets their ends
better, but I think the Republicans want to wait just a little bit and
let's be sure we do it right the first time? (Applause.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, let me thank you for your
service. (Applause.)

And this is an important set of questions in terms of how we
implement going forward. If you look at the recommendations of the
commission, some of them aren't fully fleshed out. We've got ideas and
concepts, but the devil is in the details. So you really got to focus
upon exactly how that works. One of the key requirements going forward
will be the relationship of this new National Intelligence Director
with the existing arrangement in terms of the CIA, the FBI, Defense,
and so forth. And the President is very much aware of all that.

The key here will be to put it together in such a way so that you
strengthen overall the President's capabilities as Commander-in-Chief.
He's the one, after all, who has to have this intelligence brought to
him. You can have the best intelligence community in the world doing
great collection and analysis, but if it doesn't get to the
policymaker, it's meaningless. And you cannot have -- (applause) --
you cannot have a President who is getting flawed information, or isn't
getting a balanced view in terms of what's out there. So there are a
lot of key questions that will have to be answered as we go forward.
We'll want to debate and discuss with the Congress. Congress is going
to hold hearings. They should.

One of the areas that I think badly needs work is the whole
question of how Congress relates to executive branch in this area.
We've got a tendency to fragment authority on Capitol Hill. Take Tom
Ridge, for example, who is Secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security. He has to report to 88 separate committees and
sub-committees of the Congress. Now, that's an impossibility. There
are not enough hours in the day for him to do all the testimony they'd
like to have him do. They really need to reorganize themselves on
Capitol Hill and get one or two major places in each house that have
got jurisdiction over homeland security and everybody else get out of
their hair, so you've got clear lines -- (Applause.)

Congress also has developed a great facility over the years for
writing detailed instruction into the authorization legislation. When
I was Secretary of Defense, back from '89 to '93, during the first Gulf
War, and the period at the end of the Cold War, I had to deal every
year with a defense authorization bill that was about 80 to 90 pages
long. That 80 to 90 pages included very explicit instructions on "you
will buy" X number of MREs, for example -- or you'll by this system,
and not that system -- spend this much, and so forth. It was a very
detailed management instruction. Imagine trying to run an organization
or a company with that much detailed direction. But the defense
authorization bill now isn't 90 pages, it's 700 pages long. What
Congress has done is layered on a whole bunch of additional
requirements with the result that the Secretary of Defense has great
difficulty meeting all those requirements, and so basically -- running
his job. So there's a lot Congress needs to do. And you can -- just
as you've got to look at what has happened in the executive branch over
the years in terms of trying to improve the performance of the
intelligence community, it's also very important to look at what
happened on intelligence committees in the House and Senate. Were they
doing their job? Were they actively involved in the right kind of
oversight? Did you have members who were actively and aggressively
engaged in carrying out their responsibilities? So there's enough, I
think, blame here to apportion going around, in terms of looking for
ways to improve our performance. Those are some of the key questions
that should be and I think will be asked.

Yes, another question. Down here.

Q Mr. Vice President, my question is that John Kerry -- in
other words, keeps saying that we entered Iraq without an exit
strategy. I'm interested in how the Bush administration plans to
publicize their strategy?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think the heart of the strategy is
what we're doing both in Afghanistan and Iraq, is to stand up
governments that are basically will be created by the people of Iraq.
They're the ones ultimately who have to get into the fight, so to speak
-- both from a political standpoint, in terms of establishing a
government that has legitimacy, that is composed of Iraqis, that's put
together in accordance with a constitution that they write that is
consistent with their laws, and their values, their culture and
history, and that also the Iraqis themselves are able to take over
responsibility for their own security.

The way you get there is on the one hand, as we've done, standing
up an interim Iraqi government the 30th of June, with Mr. Allawi in
charge as Prime Minister. There now are Iraqis in charge of every
single ministry of the government. There's a President, as well as a
deputy prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister. All of
these posts now are being held by -- specifically by Iraqis. That is,
they've taken over the day-to-day responsibility for running their
government. And there will be a constitution written by the group
elected next January, when they have their constitutional assembly and
election, and then after that by the end of '05, they should have in
place a newly elected -- duly constituted government composed of Iraqis
that will, in fact, reflect the will of the Iraqi people and be able to
go forward.

At the same time, we're spending a lot of time and effort now
training and equipping Iraqi personnel to take over from our forces in
terms of basic, fundamental security responsibility for the country,
building up an Iraqi national army, a police force, a security force
that can deal with the threats that are still out there. It doesn't
mean we can pull our troops out any time soon. We don't want to leave
too soon and leave a mess behind. We don't want to stay a day longer
than necessary. But our success there will depend directly upon
getting the Iraqis themselves into the fight, and we're making
significant progress, as well, there too.

General Dave Petraeus, who was the commander of the 101st Airborne
in our original operation in Iraq, he's back in there now running the
training program to stand up the Iraqi forces. He now runs, oh,
sometimes a couple hundred patrols a day in Iraq that are joint patrols
-- Americans and Iraqis side-by-side. There may be an additional
couple hundred patrols a day that are purely Iraqis doing their own
patrols. But there's still a significant role for U.S. forces, as
well, too. But bottom line is getting the Iraqis to take over the
political and security responsibilities for their own country and leave
behind the kind of government that will never again be a safe-haven for
terrorists, won't produce somebody who is devoted to weapons of mass
destruction. (Applause.)

Yes, somebody over here. Somebody got a mike? Back here, okay.

Q (Inaudible.) (Applause.) (Inaudible.) (Applause.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I agree. (Laughter and applause.) One of the
points I try to make as I travel around and often talk about is that
the vast majority of Americans believe that this is "one nation under
God." (Applause.) And we believe we ought to be able to say that when
we pledge allegiance to the flag. (Applause.)

Now, the problem we have -- of course, the Supreme Court
fortunately shot down the decision. The original decision on that came
out of the Ninth Circuit, out on the West Coast. And it was the Ninth
Circuit that decided there was merit to this guy's claim that he
brought that you should not be allowed to say "under God" when you said
the pledge. The Ninth Circuit is the most often-reversed appellate
court in the country. We recently nominated a fine man named Bill
Myers to serve on the Ninth Circuit. I know Bill well because he
married a woman who was a staffer for me when I was in Congress. And
he used to work for another Wyoming member of Congress, Al Simpson,
from Wyoming. He's a good man. He has broad bipartisan support, and
he had the votes for confirmation. But they wouldn't allow it to come
to a vote on the floor of the Senate. They used the filibuster to keep
from bringing it up, so unless you could get 60 votes, then you
couldn't get him to the floor for a vote. So Bill has not been
confirmed.

Bill would be an addition -- what I'd consider a mainstream
addition to the appellate court, the Ninth Circuit, bring some balance
back into it. And based on their decision on the Pledge of Allegiance,
it sounds to me like the Ninth Circuit could use some new judges.
(Applause.)

But the problem has been, frankly, that the Senate Democrats
including Senators Kerry and Edwards -- have consistently supported
that filibuster that kept Bill Myers off the 9th Circuit; kept
Priscilla Owens, of Texas, from getting to the floor for a vote; it
kept Charles Pickering, from Mississippi, from getting to the floor for
a vote. Anybody that might disagree with their liberal philosophy
isn't allowed to come up to a vote on the floor of the Senate, and
that's wrong. (Applause.)

Q Mr. Vice President, I'm a retired Army major -- and I still
have all my medals, by the way. (Applause.) Mr. Vice President, all
around Garland County we see the effects of the President's economic
policies, we see growth in this country, we see expansion in this
country, we see optimism in this country. But there is a hesitancy
when I have to pay $25 to $30 to fill up the tank of my car. To help
the President, to help our party, is there any way that we could
possibly reduce gas prices between now and the election? (Laughter.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well. (Laughter.) The problem we've got on
gasoline prices -- and I know it's tough these days because the price
has gotten up close to $2 a gallon most places around the country, and
that's more than we're used to paying. But what we've fallen into the
habit of doing is we continue to increase our consumption of energy,
specifically oil and gas, but we aren't producing here at home. In
fact, our production is declining. In part, that's because we made a
decision as a country -- you and I might not have agreed with it --
but, basically, we've taken large chunks of the country and put it off
limits to any kind of exploration or development. We don't drill off
the East Coast, we don't drill off the West Coast, we don't drill in
Alaska. Large parts of the Rocky Mountain West are off limits.

The technology has gotten so good that, frankly, we can develop
those kinds of resources without doing any environmental damage -- and
that includes the ANWR in Alaska, where we could go in and just with
surface disturbance of an area about half the size of Dulles Airport
outside Washington, D.C., and that only in the wintertime, you could
produce upwards of a million barrels a day. The pipeline is already
built to deliver it to the Lower 48. But we haven't been able to get
that through the Senate. We got it through the House a couple of
times; haven't been able to get it through the Senate.

So we are at the mercy of those international oil prices. Today,
the world consumes about 80 million barrels a day of petroleum
products, about 20 million of that is consumed right here in the United
States. And so we're prepared to take steps to increase our own
production here at home, and, by the way increase our refinery
capacity. One of the problems we had is the refineries we have in this
country are running flat-out, 99-100 percent capacity. It used to be
when that happened we could import refined products from Europe, bring
it in to make up for shortfalls here at home. But that's hard to do
now because we have 51 different blends of gasoline required here in
the United States to meet local air quality standards. Chicago has a
different standard than Little Rock, has a different standard than
Dallas, has a different standard than San Francisco.

So the foreign companies aren't producing the blends we need to
meet those requirements, and you can't get permits to build a new
refinery here in the states or to expand existing ones. We tried to
get authorization for that through as part of our energy plan, but
that's all tied up in the courts now.

So we have put ourselves into a box. And the only thing I can
think of to do is to keep pushing hard to enact a comprehensive energy
plan on a national basis. We need it. We came close this time
around. We got it

through the House, we got it through the Senate, it went to
conference, then the House approved the conference report and it went
back to the Senate, and we fell two votes short -- again, because of a
filibuster. We needed 60 votes to get it out of the Senate, and we
only had 58. Kerry and Edwards voted "no," they weren't with us in
trying to come up with a national energy policy.

So it's another area where I think there is a significant
difference, it's a major agenda item for us. In the President's second
term we need sound, comprehensive energy policy that encourages
conservation and new technologies and all of that, but also allows us
to have a sane policy here at home with respect to producing our own
resources. (Applause.)

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR ROCKEFELLER: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, the
Vice President is on a bit of a tight schedule, so we've got time for
perhaps one or two more questions. We haven't really gotten to this
side yet.

Q Mr. Vice President, I'm a retired businessman. (Laughter.)
I still got all my medals. (Laughter and applause.) I want to tell
you I praise God that we got you and President Bush. (Applause.) But
I have one real concern. What are we going to do about our open
borders? They're just flowing through here, north and south. How you
going to handle that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: We've significantly beefed up our manpower.
And our border control agencies, of course, have been moved out of the
-- I guess, it was Treasury. I can't remember where it used to be.
It's all now part of the Department of Homeland Security. We're
rapidly reorganizing our abilities to operate at the border, partly
because we had about three different agencies there doing different
things. You had the Customs people, you have the Border Patrol people,
you had the Immigration people -- and we're putting all of that into a
much better organized and more efficient system than we had before.
We're developing the capability -- working both the Canadians and the
Mexican authorities to improve the extent to which they're willing to
work with us to help try to control it. It's still a problem. I
cannot deny that by any means. We've got long open borders. We've got
a history of wide open commerce with our friends to the north and
south. That's one of those things we want to preserve. Canada is our
leading trading partner in the world. And free movement of goods and
ideas and people back and forth across those borders is very
important.

The problem is, is that we basically don't have the kind of control
we'd like to have so that we know who's here, what they're doing while
they're here, how long they're here, and when they leave. And we have
captured -- arrested, in effect -- some people coming across that come
from the Middle East, or who are involved, or may be involved, for
example, in actively plotting against the United States because of
those open borders. So I think we're doing better, but we've still got
a long way to go to finally achieve our objective. It's going to
continue to be a major objective of ours, certainly for a second term.
Tom Ridge works on it very aggressively I know. As I say, I think both
Mexico and Canada are doing a better job on their side now in terms of
cooperating with us. Okay?

She's got a microphone here.

Q It's good to see you here again. I saw you in 2000. But
before I ask you this question, I want to thank Mrs. Cheney for that
lovely book she wrote for children. I bought for of them, and my
grandchildren love them -- very educational. (Applause.) After all,
she needs some allocations there.

What I want to know is, are we ever going to pump oil out of the
northwest part of the Alaska and I know the environmentalists say, no,
we can't do it there. It's new techniques of how to extract oil from
the ground -- one oil well with offshoots, so you don't have it looking
like California in the 1920s -- everywhere you look there was an oil
derrick. But nowadays, with the modern -- you should know with your
Halliburton company that you worked for, that you can put in one oil
well, and you can pump out from all different directions. Am I right?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: You're correct. We can go in now and on a pad
probably the side of this room set up shop, and with directional
drilling, go down very deep and reach out several miles.

Q So why are the environmentalists against that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's become an emotional issue. It's the kind
of thing -- I've been to Prudhoe Bay, for example, on a number of
occasions. That's where we've developed the original field up there.
And that's where the Alaska pipeline originates from. Just to the east
of there is ANWR, the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, it's called. I
was a member of the House when we set up ANWR. It was set up
specifically as Alaska National Wildlife Reserve with the proviso that
it would, at some point, be available when we needed it for extraction
of the petroleum resources underneath it. We estimate we could get as
much as a million barrels a day out of there.

The other technique that's been developed, in addition to
directional drilling, where you can go start in one spot and reach out
and cover thousands of square miles is you operate only in the winter
time. And you build ice roads out to the pad where you'd actually do
the work and the drilling work. And then after the melt in the spring,
you don't use -- you don't have any roads. So there's no -- in effect,
once the ice road melts, there's no trace left of the path out to the
pad. (Applause.) You'd have to lay a gathering system, short pipeline
to move whatever you produced from ANWR, which is right up on the
coast, as I say, just east of Prudhoe Bay, to get it over to the
pipeline that dead ends at Prudhoe Bay. But then you're in the TAPs
line -- the Trans Alaska Pipeline -- that we built back in the '60s,
that runs from there all the way down to Valdez. And it's already
there. It's running at about half capacity. You wouldn't have to
build the pipeline. It's a no-brainer from the standpoint of most
people. If you've ever seen the countryside up there, the wildlife are
not threatened by this development. The last time I flew into Prudhoe
Bay, I had to circle for about 20 minutes while they got the grizzly
bears off the air strip. So anyway, we should do it.

Q As a minority who is sick and tired of the Democratic
paradigm of middle wage jobs or welfare for African Americans --
(applause) -- I just want to say on behalf of my community, thanks to
you and the President for everything you've done to provide economic
development and expansion for everyone -- minorities included. I know
several people who have used their Bush tax rebates to start
businesses. We thank you and we applaud you both.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: All right. (Applause.)

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR ROCKEFELLER: Ladies and gentlemen, now you
know who truly reflects the views and values of everyday Arkansans,
George Bush and Dick Cheney -- the heart and soul of America. Thank
you, Mr. Vice President. (Applause.)